Taking a picture of the Milky way is like trying to take a picture of the inside of your house while you are inside it, and while your house is cluttered with a bunch of junk!
Because we are inside the Milky Way, we don't get to take any pictures of it from an angle "above" the galaxy. (However, we can make an educated guess as to what the Milky Way might look like from such an angle—for example, there are tons of artist's illustration.)
Instead, we only get pictures in which we see the structure of the Milky Way edge-on, from inside of it. Each picture is a panoramic photo—if you want an idea of what we really see, imagine taking each picture and wrapping it in a big circle around you. The photographer has simply chosen to "cut" and "unfold" this circle such that the Galactic Center (the brightest part of the Milky Way) is in the picture's center. This might give the illusion that we are looking at an edge-on picture of the Milky Way from the outside, but in reality we are not—the left and right edges of this picture simply represent material in the Milky Way that is located in the opposite direction of the Galactic Center from our point of view, and since we ourselves are pretty close to the edge of the Milky Way, there isn't much to see in this direction.
